Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature

Martha Nussbaum has been recently described as a "philosopher of feelings" and indeed, throughout her career, she has written on disgust, shame, desire, sex, patriotism, love, empathy, and most recently, anger. According to Nussbaum, there is ethical value in emotions, and we are wrong to ostracize them outside the sphere of philosophical relevance. Understanding our emotions helps us build a morally just society and relate to one another in a way that is deeply respectful and moral. It helps us extend our humanity toward people we have previously rejected as "the other," and is a crucial part of building a healthy democracy.

Emotions are extremely significant to our efforts of living a good life. In Love’s Knowledge(1990), Nussbaum maintains that feelings have unrightfully been banished from philosophy under two equally false pretexts. Critics have either portrayed them as these blind, irrational impulses that have nothing to do with cognition and have to be strictly controlled by the reins of rationality, or maintained that if they do have any cognitive value and can indeed tell us something about the world, what they tell us is simply false. The first objection equates an emotion with an instinctual appetite, an animal need, a mere bodily function. Yet, Nussbaum argues, we can agree that grief, for instance, is very much different from hunger, and in fact due to developments in anthropology, cognitive science, and psychology, this view has become antiquated. Besides, we don’t need scientific evidence to acknowledge that grief cannot be compared to hunger, as grief is sustained by a variety of assumptions with epistemic value. Which leads us to the second set of objections.

Emotions do have cognitive value, so it should only follow logically that they must have some ethical value as well. To continue with the example of grief, the experience of the feeling presupposes the belief that someone has been lost, that the loss is irrevocable, that the person lost had tremendous and irreplaceable value, etc. To give another example, Nussbaum’s account of anger unfolds the various assumptions that underlie this emotion, amongst which the idea that there is some kind of cosmic balance that has been upset when a person has been wronged, and that directing his or her fury at the wrongdoer will somehow restore that balance.

Some emotions encompass beliefs about the world that upon scrutiny do indeed turn out to be wrong, but this is precisely why we need to take them seriously and subject them to careful investigation. It can be expected that upon discovering that certain emotions are unwarranted or unfounded, we will discard them, just as we do with beliefs when we discover they are false. Some emotions are indeed irrational, but so are a vast number of beliefs, yet it has never occurred to philosophers to banish beliefs from philosophy altogether. Furthermore, it is inconsistent, Nussbaum argues, to discredit emotions as insignificant and untrustworthy, while simultaneously recognizing that a change in one’s feelings also brings with it a change in one’s beliefs (see, for instance, the role emotions play in advertising or politics). We are wary of a political discourse suffused with emotions, as it can be much more effective than one that fully ignores our feelings. The Sophists, masters of rhetoric that they were, knew and fully embraced this, but Nussbaum points out that they weren’t the only ones. Pre-Socratic philosophers and poets were much more supportive of an entanglement between art, emotions, and philosophy, before Socrates/Plato came along and drew a dichotomy between them (pp. 14–15).

"Belief," Nussbaum writes, "is sufficient for emotion, and emotion necessary for full belief" (p. 41). If a person believes that X was the most important person in her life, and X died, then that person will be affected by grief. If she doesn’t believe in the significance of X, she will not experience grief. Conversely, if a person maintains that she is a feminist, for instance, and witnesses an act of abuse against women and yet has no reaction (i.e., outrage), this would make us question the sincerity of that person’s convictions. We should admit, along with Aristotle—a philosopher Nussbaum reveres and draws significantly from—that emotions are "discriminating responses closely connected with beliefs about how things are and what is important" (ibid.). Sometimes, they might be even more reliable as our moral compasses than detached intellectual judgements, since they embody our most deeply rooted views about the world.

If emotions indeed have cognitive value, why do we still reject them? Nussbaum suggests that the main objection brought to emotions is that "they involve value judgements that attach great worth to uncontrolled things outside the agent; they are … acknowledgements of the finite and imperfectly controlled character of human life" (p. 42). To counter this vulnerability, Western philosophy has aspired to a kind of self-sufficiency, a belief that nothing bad will ever happen to those who do everything right.

In the uncertain world of ancient Greece, being human was seen as both supremely beautiful and fatally doomed. In a world governed by capricious gods, man felt subjected to tuche(fate or luck, or as Nussbaum explains it, that which just happens to a person as opposed to that which is her own doing). Many thus aspired to regain some form of control, some way to escape being at the mercy of tuche. This control came in the form of Platonic, rational self-sufficiency. Use your reason and you will be in touch with the divine forms. Nothing bad can happen to a good person. This rational self-sufficiency aspires to make "the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason" ([1986] 2001, p. 3). At its roots lies Socrates’s claim that a good person cannot be harmed, as expressed by Plato in the Apology (41c-d).

Nussbaum urges us to recognize, along with the Greek tragic poets, that mankind is fragile. In TheFragility of Goodness (id., p. 5), she writes that her position acknowledges

That I am an agent, but also a plant; that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one's good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason.

These "everyday facts of lived practical reason" may be central to morality, but unfortunately, our lives are limited. Building on Aristotle’s views in his Rhetoric and Poetics, Nussbaum reminds us that "we have never lived enough" and that our experience is "too confined and too parochial" (1990, p. 47). Fortunately, however, there is something that can compensate for the inevitable shortness of our lifespan and the limited breadth of human experience: literature.

Literature extends our life and our experience, "making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling" (ibid.) One of the main points of literary art is to present us with moments where "habit is cut through by the unexpected" (p. 43), testing our aspirations to live a good life through events outside of our control. This way of reading becomes a way of moral learning, a way of training ourselves to recognize the important features in a moral situation. No prefabricated principle can help us here, but we can only learn experientially, step by step, guided by the novel.

Nussbaum describes moralities that are exclusively based on general and universal principles as "ethically crude" (p. 37) and instead proposes the view influenced by Aristotle, which focuses on practical wisdom. General principles can only help us so much, and, following Aristotle’s analogy between ethical judgement and the arts of a navigator, there will always be the "unexpected" to face, our version of the Greek tuche, and inevitably, principles will prove insufficient. Here is where perception will prove more useful, defined as the ethical ability to discern the important features of one’s particular situation. Perceptions, in combination with a healthy dose of moral responsibility, are the ethical antidote to principles. We should bear in mind that "perception without responsibility is dangerously free-floating, even as duty without perception is blunt and blind" (p. 155).

Literature widens our experience and expands our moral imagination. It gives us the opportunity to vicariously explore seemingly infinite instances of lived practical reason. In her essay "Finely Aware and Richly Responsible," Nussbaum makes the case for the novel as a "paradigm of moral activity" (p. 148). It gives us the uniquely privileged position from which we can explore situations deeply, but from afar. It allows us to be emotionally involved while also maintaining neutrality. In this sense, we inhabit a place that is "both like and unlike the position we occupy in life" (p. 48), perfect for awakening ourselves to moral perceptions. Much like a rehearsal before the live show, novels give their readers the opportunity to explore ethically demanding situations from a place of safety.

James’s novel The Golden Bowl serves as an example of a literary piece that provides the reader with moral perceptions, those nuanced insights into some of the infinitely varied instances of human existence. Because of the privileged position that the literary form of the novel offers, "Most of us can read James better than we can read ourselves’’ (p. 162). It is only once we’re aware of these fine complexities and reach a state of "perceptive equilibrium" that we can hope to act morally. To ignore the particularities, the contingencies and the "context-embeddedness" (1990, p. 38) of human experience is to be morally blind. "By themselves, trusted for and in themselves, the standing terms are a recipe for obtuseness" (p. 156). Instead, to respond with the right emotions "at the right times, with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence" (Aristotle EN 1106b21-23, quoted in Nussbaum, 1990, 156). Analyzing The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum puts forth the two main characters of the novel as two moral agents, two people who managed to act altruistically toward each other without relying on rules and concepts of duty, but instead "improvised" with the particulars given to them. Perceptions assume priority over rules, and the particulars of a situation over general principles.

Artistic narratives are sometimes the only possible way of rendering life in an accurate fashion:

Certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist. With respect to certain elements of human life, the terms of the novelist’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech, or of abstract theoretical discourse are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy. (1990, p. 5)

Nussbaum invites us to suppose, along with Proust, that ‘The most important truths about human psychology cannot be communicated or grasped by intellectual activity alone: powerful emotions have an irreducibly important cognitive role to play" (p. 7). If we combine this with the assumption that there is an organic connection between form and content, then novels emerge as a unique medium for truth-telling. Style is not incidental to the content it aims to convey, Nussbaum suggests, but rather the adequate fit between form and content is almost absolute, in the sense that once something is appropriately conveyed in a rich artistic form, it cannot be expressed equally well in, for instance, rigid academic terms. Paraphrasing in a completely different style will fail.

If we accept all of the above, is there anything left for the philosopher to do? Should Nussbaum herself not have written the 400-pageLove’s Knowledge because the novels she writes about speak for themselves?

Firstly, it was necessary to explain—philosophically—why not taking novels seriously would be a great loss to philosophy. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, once again inspired by Aristotle, Nussbaum does advocate a philosophical style that, while different from the expressiveness typical of literary texts, can also be "their natural ally" (p. 18). While the critical skills proper to philosophy can be substantially helpful, it is imperative that philosophy assumes a much more modest role.

Philosophical commentary should only gesture toward concrete particulars, nudging us toward responsible perceptions, providing a mere "sketch" or "outline" of the "salient features of our moral life" (p. 161). The awareness that such an outline does not contain life itself, but can only "quote life" as it were from the literary text, places philosophical commentary in a "posture of sufficient humility" (ibid.).

It will be interesting to see if more philosophers embrace this newly defined role. Given the reaffirmed importance of emotions in our ethical lives, and the significance of artistic narratives, the philosophical style, as reimagined by Nussbaum, is presented with new requirements. It must clarify in a way that is enriching, explain without being oppressive, and illuminate the fineness of human experience while still protecting its fascinating multiplicity. The readers of Love’s Knowledge will hopefully agree that in terms of style and philosophical commentary, Nussbaum herself has managed to live up to the standard that she so graciously elevated.

Ana Sandoiu is a writer, researcher & philosophy lover living in Brighton, UK. She also writes on her personal blog, On a Saturday Morning.

Comments

Just wanted to say that I love Martha Nussbaum. This is a great overview of her thought. I wish English departments would follow her lead a bit more, but oh well.

Just for laughs, PEL might want to consider asking her U of C colleague, Judge Posner, to come on the show to discuss whatever philosophy book he wants. Or if they prefer to discuss one of his books, maybe the Problems of Jurisprudence? Posner might actually do it!

This will be kind of a side-bar, Ana, but I wonder if you might take it up, all the same, in light of your blogpost above. If we agree, per Nussbaum, that literature is doing profound philosophical work (or at least conveying practical wisdom) in its own unique and inimitable way, might we able to draw a straight line between the tool-set being used by secular, fictional story-tellers and the allegorical narrators we find in sacred texts (be they the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or even the Qur’an)?

I’m particularly interested to know if the conceits of ‘magical realism’ are merely another version / retooling of the more sensational (and literally-dubious) claims made in famous religious narratives, which co-confessionalists will alternately take as scientifically true or mere metaphor. In other words, are the leaps of imagination made in ordinary fiction, and those in canonical/creation myth stories, (1) analogous, and (2) perform a/the critical element in conveying the import / practical wisdom meant to be delivered by their telling?

If that linkage is not unreasonable, would those of us who look upon the literal truth of, say, biblical narrative with skepticism – but still receive the stories well and imbued with profound meaning – be well-served to understand them as a cognitive cousin to the literary/philosophical function of magical realism?

Hey Luke, sorry for my delayed reply, comments notifications don’t always seem to make it to my primary inbox, for some reason…

Thanks so much for your thoughtful & almost poetically-styled comment 🙂 Let me try & break it down a bit.

I personally don’t think we can draw a straight line between secular fiction and ‘sacred’ fiction. I think the line is fluid, and the difference is a matter of degree – a degree of fineness in the richness & corresponding description of human experience. I find that religious parables are an unlikely combination of obscurity and crudeness, and I think they’re moralizing in a more simplistic way that Nussbaum would’ve cared to advocate.

‘Magical realism‘ as I understand it (that of J.L. Borges of G. G. Marquez, for example) I think is a super-interesting case – both it and creation myth stories rely on myths and allegories, but magical realism is more nuanced, it offers more space for introspection by giving a voice to the characters and their inner struggles. I don’t find that in parables or creation myths (the psychology & moral struggles are indeed implied, but not described in a way that makes us access other people’s minds, I don’t think). I think parables draw harsher moral contours & are almost prescriptive in nature. Moreover, I don’t find much room for emotions in parables, and not much inhabiting of uncertainty. The focus seems to be more on the developing of action in time, in almost a hurry to reach a moralizing conclusion, whereas I think what Nussbaum loves about literature is the space it allows for uncertainty and fragility. Nussbaum is also a keen supporter of empathy, and the novels she’d praise would increase that empathy. I suppose biblical parables do this too, but I think to a more limiting extent and towards a more binding conclusion.

The ‘leaps of imagination’ are a very interesting point. I do think the ones in ordinary fiction & those in creation myth stories are analogous, but I’m not entirely certain that the element of magic, or the fabulous element that surreptitiously slides in between the cracks of magical realism is necessary for the expansion of one’s moral imagination. Perhaps it is, perhaps if our moral imagination is to expand, so should our understanding of reality. Maybe we need to embellish reality in order to better represent that ‘tuche’ that could catch us by surprise at any given moment. So, too little embellishment and our moral intuitions risk to remain somewhat provincial, yet too much might make it more difficult for readers to empathize & recognize themselves in the story.

I guess that ties in with the fundamental question of whether magical realism has the ability to deliver that ‘critical element’ needed to convey practical wisdom – and I’m not sure about that…There are so many different kinds of magical realism too, if I think of two random favorites of mine, ‘The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira’ by Marquez and ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ by Borges (or actually anything by him), my immediate impulse would be to say Erendira has higher chances of holding that critical element, because the focus is more on the characters’ psychology & their inner turmoil. In Nussbaum’s philosophy at least, I never got the impression that a departure from reality in the way that magical realism does is in any way essential to the expansion of our moral imagination, but quite on the contrary– after all she relies heavily on Henry James, I don’t think it gets more realist than that.

I’m not sure this answers or helps your question… I feel like this might be the beginning of a wonderful research thesis. Or a topic for one of our Phi Fic podcasts 🙂 What do you think? What do you understand by magical realism & do you have any favourite writers in this genre?

So, first of all, thank you for your thoughtful and in-depth response; I am flattered and grateful! I likewise signed up for the comments notifications, but only by serendipity did I stumble upon your reply so soon. If our exchange here, therefore, had to proceed in fits and starts, maybe we will finally be rewarded by the extra time for mutual reflection.

I think you possibly captured what I was after, with my comment, when you expressed the following: “The ‘leaps of imagination’… in ordinary fiction & those in creation myth stories are analogous, but I’m not entirely certain that the element of magic… is necessary for the expansion of one’s moral imagination. Perhaps it is, perhaps if our moral imagination is to expand, so should our understanding of reality. Maybe we need to embellish reality in order to better represent that ‘tuche’ that could catch us by surprise at any given moment. So, too little embellishment and our moral intuitions risk to remain somewhat provincial, yet too much might make it more difficult for readers to empathize & recognize themselves in the story.”

This last sentence precisely hones in on what I’m trying to unpack, and I hope is consistent with the spirit and intent of your original blogpost on Nussbaum. The creative and fictional license, and plot devices and character tropes, that we might argue are exhibited in both ‘sacred’ and ordinary literature – and what in at least a couple of the PEL podcasts, if I am not mistaken, have been referred to as “the charms” of narrative – are doing important work for the consumer/reader that, for example, a tome of analytical philosophy can simply never attain.

In that sense, I want to propose that these conceits of fabulous narrative and fiction (be they secular or religiously-inspired) are carrying similar water, if we might yet qualify as much by saying their products are not the exact same chemical make-up.

Very good. So where am I going with all this? Well, while I am superficially-familiar with Borges and Marquez, my particular interest in this regard – I specialize in Islamic cultures and history – is to do some investigation of the possible continuities and congruence between, say, the magical realism of a famous, Islamic-heritage author like Salman Rushdie, and the similar set of literary tools seemingly-being deployed in Qur’anic narrative.

Rushdie is famously considered a heretic and apostate by Muslim hardliners, but in fact his oeuvre – to the extent that I am conversant with it – is actually consistent with a lot of the style and spirit of Islamic seerah (the miraculous biography of the faith’s most important prophet, Mohammad) and the inspiring (if admittedly-didactical) stories of the Qur’an.

It strikes me as very curious that this linkage has not been more publicly-recognized (though I’m fairly certain Rushdie has pointed to it), and that it might / *might* be a means for contemporary and observant Muslims to think critically/originally about the import and moral meaning of their own tradition.

Well, that is quite a project indeed! I concede as much. But it’s something I want to explore at length with anyone that will gamely travel with me. Qur’anic narrative, I fear, is possibly not as accessible or inviting to a Western/English-native audience as more familiar Christian and Jewish traditions will be, but – still being Abrahamic and inspired by the same font of received revelation – it’s certainly not out of grasp, no less for helpful, cross-cultural aids like Rushdie himself.

Alright, well, thank you again for your indulgence! When I can clear the space and dedicated-time on my own personal calendar, it is surely subject matter that I would consider pointing up for a Phi Fic podcast or PEL blogpost(s).

I have much more to say about all this, but will take a pause for any more potential comments. Warm regards.

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